Rafting the Nile

February 25,2004

I would just like to take a few minutes to tell you about the adventure I just went on Monday. Two of the singles from Kampala decided to go rafting last Monday. They were taking two girls from the states who were working in the hospital in Kampala for a month. They invited me and Ashley to go with them, and we of course jumped at the opportunity.

We left for Kingfisher on Sunday morning. It is about a two-hour drive from Mbale, and just outside the town of Jinja (1 hour East of Kampala.) Kingfisher is a gorgeous resort with great missionary discounts. Sandi, our other single girl here in Mbale, decided to go with us to Kingfisher and spend Monday in Jinja while we rafted. When we got there, we hung out in this beautiful pool all afternoon. It has a small water slide, and a bride going over it with vines growing over the bridge.

All of the "rooms" are really separate Bandahs, which are the little round houses with thatched roofs that most people here live in. These Bondahs looked the same on the outside, but the thatching of the roof was actually covering a concrete roof. I was very relieved about this because of the things that live in real thatched roofs.

We stayed in the honeymoon sweet, which had one huge bed, so Ashley and Sandi slept there, and I slept on the couch. That was not a good decision on my part because I have a hard enough time sleeping as it is. There was no reason for me to volunteer for the most uncomfortable place in the whole Bandah to sleep. I finally fell asleep at about 2am, and woke up to Ashley's alarm at 6:30am.

apparently because I had a dream about the guide telling us statistics on how many teachers. yes teachers. not people, get eaten a year by the crocs. Then. while we were driving to the drop point on Monday morning, one of the guys in a rescue kayak pointed out a croc close to the bridge we were driving over. I think he was just messing with us though. When I had mentioned to Sandi earlier about the crocs, she said that they didn't live in this part of the Nile. Also, when I told Mark. the single guy from Kampala who went with us, about it, he said the same thing. Then, before we got in the water. the guide jokingly told us how to fight off a croc. I felt much better once I realized that it was all in jest.

I was getting really nervous by the time we got to the water. Once we got in though, I was okay. The guide told us that before every rapid, we would stop and he would tell us all of the instructions that we would need for that particular rapid. He would tell us what direction to swim if we fell out. He would tell us if the water was shallow and we needed to float on our backs so as not to injure ourselves. He would tell us if we needed to get back to the raft as quickly as possible. He also taught us all of the commands that we would use for the day, and we practiced carrying them out. Rapid measurements go up to a grade 6. Guides do not take groups down any grade 6's on the Nile. Our biggest ones were grade 5's. We had 4 grade 5's today.

Then, we went down the first of 11 rapids. It was a grade 1. It was not too bad, and I was thinking, "Maybe I can do this." As we continued for a while and went down a few more rapids, my confidence grew. We had managed to make it down the longest rapid of the day, which happened to also be a grade 5, without flipping the raft. By that point, I thought that we might make it through the whole day without ending up in the water. At one point, after our second rapid, the guide flipped the raft on purpose to teach us how to hold on and breath under it. I ended up in the air pocket under the raft, so I could breath just fine. There was one other person under there with me. We each got out one at a time. Then, he sent in the others who had not managed to get stuck under the raft. After that experience, I didn't think that getting trapped would be too bad. Then it happened.

We were coming up on our next grade 5 rapid. It was named Silver Back, and rightfully so. If you fell out of the raft, it felt like a Silver Back Gorilla was stepping on your head. As we began down this rapid, our raft flipped immediately at the top. I got trapped under the raft, but there was no air pocket because my head was caught on one of the seat looking things that helped make the air pockets. When I got out from under that part, I was still under the raft. Now, this would normally be good except that we were still in the middle of the rapid. Unfortunately, in being under the raft, you can not see when you need to take a breath. Every time I went to breathe in, I sucked in the Nile instead. I started panicking. My common sense never kicked in, and I thought I was going to drown right there in the middle of the Nile. Eventually, probably within 30 seconds, the rapid was over. The guide, who was standing on top of the overturned raft ready to flip it back over, called to see if anyone was under there. I screamed out yes, and all of a sudden a hand reached in and pulled me out. Before I knew it, the guide was back on top of the raft and ready to flip it. (We all had to be on one side of the raft. He flipped it towards us. It looked like it was going to flip on top of us, but really, we just dunked our heads underwater as it came over us and we ended upon the outside of the raft.) Then, we began being pulled into the raft. That rapid really took it out of me. I was not really looking forward to the rest of the day. We still had two grade 5 rapids left, and quite a few grade 4s.

At that point, we stopped at a long stretch of still water and we ate pineapple and watermelon. Since it was all natural foods, we just threw what we didn't eat into the Nile. I was ready for a break by then. Eventually our rescue raft and kayaks caught up to us and attached themselves to us to eat.

About those rescue kayaks and the raft, when we fell out of the raft, they knew where everyone was. We had at least two kayaks and one raft specifically for that purpose. They were very efficient and had people who had fallen out back to the raft before we could even do a head count to see who was missing. This did make me feel a little better about the whole flying out to who knows where part of the experience.

After "lunch", we began again. On one of our harder rapids, it happened again, or so I thought. We were going through this one, and I literally mean through. All of a sudden things went wrong. I hit my lower lip on something hard, but there was so much water everywhere that I had no idea what it was. Then, all I could see was water, so I thought that we had flipped. I decided right then and there not to get trapped under the raft again, so I let go. The next thing I knew. I was out in the water a few meters from the boat, and Ashley was right beside me. I found someone's paddle on my way back and actually had the presence of mind to bring it in with me. That time out of the raft was actually quite exciting. I just got to enjoy the movement of the water and knew exactly when to breath, so it was fun.

When I got back in the raft, I saw Ellen, a single girl from Kampala, with blood all over the bottom half of her face. We had no idea where the blood was coming from until she got cleaned up. Then we realized that she had busted her lip open, we still had no idea what hit her.

One rapid we went down was making me kind of nervous. We were actually having to straddle two rapids. One was a grade 6 that a man had died on, the other was a very dangerous grade 5. We had to pay close attention to the guide when he said to paddle, and when he said to stop and get down. Otherwise, we would have ended up on one of the other rapids, and that could have been costly. Luckily, not only were we a group that worked well together and made it down the correct rapid, we actually all stayed in the raft for the whole thing. I was very pleased about that one.


The next to the last rapid was a grade 4. It was kind of a hard one, and we flipped the raft again. Luckily, I ended up on the outside of this one. I was still hanging on, as we had been taught, so the guide had me move to the other side where the rest of the group was so that he could re-flip our raft. Once that one was over, we had to go near our last rapid and get out of the raft. The last rapid began as a grade six. We were having to walk up a cliff over the grade 6 and get in somewhere else where it was safer to finish the rapid on a grade 5. This last rapid was an option because it was right by the place where we finished. To get to it, we had to walk up the cliff barefoot because they had taken our shoes at the beginning of the trip. I had every intention of going down the last rapid until I saw that you actually started in the middle of the grade 6 rapid. I got very nervous about having to move the raft from the edge of the cliff, over to the middle of the river to finish the rapid. Especially since in doing so, you had to go between two large rocks. I opted out of the last one, and instead walked with two of the other girls down the cliff to watch our group do it.

They flipped very early into the rapid. and it looked very harsh. I was glad I didn't go down it. Then, I had to hike back up the cliff, still barefoot, with the other two girls to the meeting area. There, we got our shoes and ate dinner before leaving. Our rides happened to be there waiting on us, so we didn't have to ride in the truck back to the rafting place. We just got to go straight home.

I gave Mark money to go buy me a video of the trip. Some of us had decided to hire the guy who came out to film the day. I will pick it up this weekend when I am back in Jinja for the Adventure Race.

Sandi and Darla, another single girl from Kampala who had also opted out of rafting, brought us some white ants (termites) to try. We got the cameraman over there and lined up while he filmed each of us eating our white ants. They actually weren't bad. They just tasted like burnt meat.

Well, that's all about my day of rafting. I hope you enjoyed it.

(Ellen offered the guide sunscreen as a joke because you burn so easily out there, and he laughed and then told us that he used to be Mazungu (white) before he became a guide. We all got a good laugh out of that one.)